Thimbleweed Park

Welcome to Thimbleweed Park, a small town that’s quickly losing steam after the main factory supporting everyone has closed down. Now it is a shell of it’s former self, but strange things are happening. It all starts with a murder, and the two government agents sent to investigate.

This is a point and click game meant to be reminiscent of the old LucasArts style games. You interact with the world through a series of verbs, such as Open, Close, Push, Pull and more.

Find it on Steam.

Thimbleweed Park is made by some of the people involved in Monkey Island. Expect a game that’s not too serious, but still builds a great atmosphere. There are lots of in-jokes to point-and-click games along with references to LucasArts stuff.

But how is this different? For one, well, I guess it’s not really different, but a return to having multiple different verbs to interact with things. It’s a cool callback to an old system.

Is it practical, though? Not particularly. There are really few points in the game where it makes sense to have more than the look/interact modes. And using objects on things require an extra step of clicking on the use button. Still, I like it for bringing back memories.

For the second difference, you control up to five different characters. After the intro, you get control of your first two (the government agents) and slowly gain more over the game.

In the beginning, there doesn’t seem to be much point in it. They both have the same lines in reacting to things, and having the inventory split between them is annoying as you’ll have to trade things to get one character with all the needed items.

As the game goes on, though, and things open up, there are lots of puzzles that use multiple characters or certain characters, and their differences become more apparent. Though there are always points where all characters react with the same line to something, even when it doesn’t make sense. Still, it’s nice having them talk to each other.

This game has a charming atmosphere that inspires a bit of dread, but there is a lot of strangeness as well. You go through interacting with various characters, such as the Pigeon Sisters, who own Pigeon Brothers Plumbing. There is also the mailman, the bum and more. Each of them are quirky and are interesting to talk to.

Now all of that is well and good, but how about the puzzles? Is the game going to be filled with strange logic? No. For the most part, the puzzles are pretty logical, though there definitely is some strange parts.

What makes it hard, though is that the setting is pretty much the same the entire way through the game. Sure, the town opens up a bit later on, but it’s still the same area. That means you might see several things that are meant to solve later puzzles that you can’t do anything with yet. And then you forget about them when you actually need them.

Not to worry, though, there is an in-game hint system that works really well. It won’t reveal too much unless you really need help.

Okay, I’m going to add some spoiler thoughts here. But first, let me say that Thimbleweed Park is a great game in the style of the old LucasArts adventure games. A quirky quality pervades the entire town and all of the characters. It has an interesting story of mystery and intrigue spread out across five playable characters.

Alright, on to the spoiler part. It’s not going to go into a lot of details, but it is a problem I have with the game. And that is the ending part goes straight off the rails. Pretty much everything set up before is thrown out for some strangeness. It’s disappointing that all of the things before become unimportant, but the journey to get there is still interesting and full of fun.

Find it on Steam.